How to survive an active shooter situation

Or how to trauma-bond all the way to the chapel

Good news for romantics. As workers are made to come back to the office, as schools across America end their breaks, as dating apps and wokeness recede like snowmelt into Gaia herself, and as the birds and bees pollinate all the beautiful flowers so dutifully recreated on the fast fashion tradwife dresses I make the missus wear while cooking up grass-fed bison for our cats, a hot new trend is taking the nation. If you hate dating apps, you’ll love a near-death experience.

Navigate a diverse and mission-focused work environment with a quiet yet inviting floor-plan offering ample opportunity to show your athleticism and game-time decision-making skills. Whether jumping behind medium-density fibreboard furniture or slipping into the English muffin of safety that is the electrical closet, you’ll be rolling in so many fluids by the end, you’ll need extra paternity time.

Glance into each other’s eyes as you muzzle a colleague in the midst of her midmorning matcha. Feel the heat of her whimpers escape the Lustregloss of her lips into the calluses of your hands which are hard from lifting tremendous amounts of weight when you aren’t making five times her salary in wage-gap privilege. Let her know that no matter what happens ballistically, you see her as your equal and know she’s just as qualified to end this thing as you are.

Let her know you care by squeezing her waist as you watch a janitor’s nametag explode right before he catches another bullet in his carotid. As you watch his anonymous corpse bleed out through the sprinkler in his throat, you make a mental note for your inevitable takeover: They should be forced to wear dog tags since no one learns their name in the first place and it isn’t fair to expect people not to shoot them.

Demonstrate your alpha by using a staff accountant as a human shield. Anyone sufficiently numerate will understand. This is pure survival math. One thing everyone must understand is the need to survive and team up with IT workers who are the most likely to have brought firearms and armor to work, assuming they are not the ones advancing the beneficiaries on everyone’s 401k’s at the moment.

But above all else, remember that if you do not stay alive long enough to have sex with your coworkers, they will not respect you.

The same is true at school. The only dead guys girls like are vampires and we all know you are not a vampire. Give all the hickeys you want but it takes extreme overcast and truancy to avoid getting too much sun anywhere besides the Pacific Northwest. You can use desks, bleachers, and certain sanitary products so readily available in school bathrooms male or female. You can bring as many as two friends to hide behind most P.E. teachers but you can probably only bed one at a time. Choosing who lives and who dies should be a libidinal activity but having sex with more than one girl at a time will earn you your own reputation for trauma.

Make sure to go to the funerals and memorials, even the people you didn’t like or never took the time to know, knowing you wouldn’t like them anyway. If you’re in the workforce, give a public donation of $50 to the guy with three kids whose nametag detonated into a confetti of black and gold. Be better than him. Leave your name on the listing. Let them know you care. Be remembered while you’re alive. If you’re just a kid still in school, make sure to act moody and listen to music with extremely embarrassing lyrics. Use the words elegy and eulogy interchangeably.

Get drunk. A lot. Go into the bathroom with the good-looking guy whose thoughts are so pure and simple you realize his face is the only thing keeping him alive most of the time. Be nice to him. He has drugs and you will do them together after receptions. Never having bonded once, you are instant brothers. You look into his big blue Jared Leto eyes that have never registered a single thought in his entire life and watch his pupils expand over the galaxies of indigo. You both splash water on your face and fist-bump as you walk back to the action

Sometimes, even though your friends and colleagues are dead, people will end up dancing after hours or at bars. You can’t explain it. No one is even pretending to be self-conscious about it since you know you aren’t celebrating their death and, if you’re in public, no one else knows why you’re there anyway.

Tell the story. Begin calling yourself a survivor. Practice it on different people in different settings at different times of day. Make slight variations so you can A/B test what works. This is not about lying. You are editing, highlighting, toning up or down. You focus on the bullet here, the dust here, the desks splintering into sawdust, an entire firearms clinic put on before your very eyes. Do it so much you know where to add in pauses and disfluencies. Pepper certain places with a sigh. If you are going to make a dramatic pause or clear your throat, save it for a good part. You don’t want to oversell it or use up your ammo on an undisciplined whimsy or capricious and low-yield ad-lib. The point of the story is not to show that you were present but that you are stoic. A hero who doesn’t get the girl might as well be a martyr and we all know it is better to get laid than die.

Both men and women you work with will cheat on their spouses with people who just had the dumb luck of coming into work that day and taking cover together. People who don’t like each other will fornicate. Probably only a handful of times. They will pretend it didn’t happen but many will know of their indiscretion since they’re doing the same. The survivors will hold it against their spouses who were neither there to catch a bullet nor protect them when they needed them most. Off at home or in their offices, at their desk or on the toilet, having a scroll through Neverneverland while the lot of you ran for your lives. Later that year, at this Christmas party or that one, they will suspect something’s up when each person introduces one to another. A glimpse. A wink. Some barely perceptible micro-expression flashes across a face causing one to know there’s something they don’t know.

You are better than this, at least if you heed my advice: Do not fuck the married people or cause classmates to cheat on their teeny-bopper love interests. You are single and this too can happen to you when you are not.

There are many to choose from including some who were never previously available to you. Poverty and chaos exacerbate the differences between men and women and even high status women will avail themselves of men who take risks, who are nimble in the face of adversity, and live long enough to penetrate them. So few people have any kind of story to tell themselves, let alone another human, and by living fast enough to have one while living long enough to tell it, you can endear yourself to even those who were there to see it. Every day you don’t use your trauma to get what you want is another day wasted in America.